Volume 3, Number 2
Virtual Worlds for Kids
December 2010
Editor-in-Chief
Jeremiah Spence
Guest Editors
Sun Sun Lim
National University of Singapore
Lynn Schofield Clark
University of Denver, USA
Cover illustrator
Lim Su Pei
National University of Singapore
Editorial Assistants
Cao Yuanying
National University of Singapore
Shobha Vadrevu
National University of Singapore
Reviewers: Denise Anthony, Iccha Basnyat, Anne M. Burke, Leanne Chang, Pin Sym Foong,
Sara Grimes, Elizabeth Hayes, Jackie Marsh, Alex Mitchell, Elmie Nekmat, Alvin Saw Teong
Chin, Becky Herr Stephenson, Shobha Vadrevu, Karen Wohlwend, Joshua Wong Wei-Ern
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Volume 3, Number 2
Virtual Worlds for Kids
December 2010
Who’s Watching Your Kids?
Safety and Surveillance in Virtual Worlds for Children
By Eric M. Meyers
School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia
Lisa P. Nathan
School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia
Kristene Unsworth
The Information School, Drexel University
Abstract
Virtual playgrounds designed for children 4-12 years-old are among the fastest
growing segments of the Internet. These spaces offer the promise of new social,
educational, and creative opportunities for young people. These opportunities, however,
are associated with new risks due to the nature of online interactions. This article
presents a socio-technical investigation of two virtual worlds for children. Informed by
Value Sensitive Design, the work highlights the tensions between supporting age
appropriate, developmental play and constraining inappropriate behavior to ensure
“safety.” This article concludes with implications for the design of virtual spaces for
young people. We note in particular that the features of children’s worlds are affected
by their framing, specifically by the language and practices that are encouraged by the
interaction design. We challenge designers to consider how children may interpret
technical feature in practice, and the long-term implications of features intended to keep
children safe.
Keywords: children’s virtual worlds, values, value sensitive design, socio-technical
This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License by the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research.
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 4
Who’s Watching Your Kids?
Safety and Surveillance in Virtual Worlds for Children
“The avatar seemed for awhile the very apotheosis of the American dream, and the
antithesis of the panopticon: it embodied the fantasy that we can refashion our selves
in any manner we wish. We can't be under surveillance if no one knows who we are:
what we look like, what color we are, what religion and ethnicity, what sex.”
(Winokur, 2003)
Cyber-stalking. Cyber-bullying. Cyber-tattling. These anxiety-inducing terms have become
part of the conversation around children’s online interactions. As children increasingly move
toward immersive spaces online, the promise of the avatar as emancipating technology has
not been fulfilled. In contrast to this utopian vision of perfect privacy and refashionable
identity, youth-focused virtual worlds have been received with a mixture of optimism and
moral panic. Scholars have identified the potential of these spaces for literacy (Merchant,
2009), learning (Beals & Bers, 2009) social interaction and creativity (Thomas & Brown,
2009); others have guardedly observed that these spaces carry opportunities as well as risks
(Harwood & Asal, 2007; Livingstone, 2009; Livingstone & Brake, 2010; Palfrey & Gasser,
2008). Articles in the popular press, particularly when these spaces first emerged, tended to
focus on risks: challenges of child safety and privacy (e.g. Flanagan, 2007), pro-social
development and consumerism (e.g. Slatalla, 2007), cheating and deviant behavior (e.g.
Benderoff, 2007).
And yet, despite a mixed reception among parents, educators, and service providers; virtual
worlds for children continue to grow in number and popularity. While adult virtual world use
has stagnated, there are dozens of virtual worlds for kids ages 5-18, and as many more under
development (KZero, 2009). It is estimated that 10 million children use virtual worlds on a
regular basis, and it is estimated that 54% of children online in the U.S. will visit a virtual
world every month by 2013 (Virtual World News, 2009). One factor that may hinder the
development of youth-focused virtual worlds is the challenge and expense of monitoring
them, both to safeguard their users and to enforce behavioral norms (Economist, 2009).
To date, little research has investigated how virtual worlds for children manage the inherent
tension between supporting age-appropriate play and constraining inappropriate behavior to
keep children “safe”. Nascent empirical work in this area (Marsh, 2010; Meyers, 2009)
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 5
suggests that sites like Club Penguin, Woogi World, BarbieGirls and Pixie Hollow are
designed to be safe places for children to play, but each site in this genre appears to have
different interpretations of what is necessary to keep a child safe online.
These
interpretations are instantiated in specific design features, such as monitored chat systems,
typically targeted to the concerns of parents rather than the intended users of the technology,
the children. In some cases, children are recruited to monitor each other to enforce the site’s
terms of service.
Such design decisions have both social and moral development
implications.
This paper presents a values-oriented, socio-technical analysis of these hugely popular virtual
spaces and how they support and constrain the values of different stakeholders. Specifically,
we investigate two virtual worlds (Woogi World and Club Penguin) with a focus on the sites’
technical features and behavioral cues designed to support value concerns (e.g. privacy,
safety, security) and critically examine the potential influence of these features from different
stakeholder perspectives. The worlds discussed above were selected as they represent two
different approaches to managing the safety of children, as will be explained later in the
paper.
We address the following questions in our work:
• How do virtual worlds for children (explicitly and implicitly) define safety?
• How is this definition of safety instantiated in technical features and behavioral cues
that scaffold children’s socio-technical practice?
• What is the role of surveillance in the design of safe virtual environments for
children?
The work reported here draws on the tripartite methodology of Value Sensitive
Design (VSD) (Friedman, Kahn, & Borning, 2006) to conduct investigations of two
children’s virtual worlds: Club Penguin and Woogi World. Our process involves two integral
investigations: 1) a conceptual investigation, where we analyze different stakeholders such as
children, adults, and designers, their roles in using the virtual world, and tensions that might
emerge in use; and 2) a technical investigation, in which we focus on specific technical
features these worlds employ, such as moderated chat systems, and the practices associated
with those features. Taken together, the analysis from the conceptual and technical
investigations informs the development of brief case studies that synthesize the findings from
the VSD-informed investigations.
The following discussion teases apart how subtle
differences in design result in a different ethos and experience for the site user. The article
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 6
concludes by outlining an empirical investigation informed by the findings and a discussion
of potential implications for the designers of children’s virtual worlds.
The project follows in the tradition of earlier conceptual explorations of values in teen
game design (Flanagan, Howe, & Nissenbaum, 2005; Flanagan, Belman, Nissenbaum, &
Diamond, 2007). Although the analysis is influenced by contemporary critiques of privacy
and surveillance (Andrejevic, 2007; Lyon, 2001), its primary aim is to scaffold future
empirical research into the long-term, systemic influence of virtual world engagement on
children’s development (Nathan, Friedman, Klasnja, Kane, & Miller, 2008). The values
orientation of the work distinguishes this project from others rooted in literacy and
communication theory.
Motivation
While virtual worlds for young people have been available since the 1990s, their
popularity and use in the home environment has exploded only in recent years. To date, there
are few research programs examining virtual worlds for children less than twelve years of
age. The existing published research has focused on developing frameworks to understand
children’s experiences in these spaces from the standpoint of play (Marsh, 2010), learning
and cognitive development (Beals & Bers, 2009), and information seeking and use (Meyers,
2009). Marsh’s interviews with ten young people examine the relationship between online
and offline play in virtual worlds, identifying that sites like Club Penguin and Barbie Girls
constitute “friendship-driven” rather than “interest driven” spaces (Ito, Baumer, Bittanti,
boyd, Cody, Herr et al., 2008). Beals and Bers describe how developmental theory might
inform the design of children’s worlds, but offer only high-level guidance for the creation of
these spaces, noting for example that children’s spaces need rules, creative outlets, and
facilities that permit communication. Meyers identifies the “information work” associated
with virtual worlds, and suggests that the most creative practices may be found outside these
worlds in affinity spaces. These framings are valuable contributions to the conversation
about children’s immersive technologies, and all conclude that these spaces represent an
emerging research area with potential benefits for young people. Thus far the research
literature has focused more on the use and mediation of these sites than on the design and
evaluation of technical features, or how these sites instantiate stakeholder values.
Virtual worlds offer the promise of new social, educational, and creative opportunities
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 7
for young people. These opportunities, however, are associated with new risks due to the
nature of online interactions (Livingstone & Brake, 2010). The Federal Trade Commission
(2009) recently released its report to the United States Congress, documenting that a number
of youth-oriented virtual worlds contained violent or sexually explicit materials,
predominantly in the form of text chat. The report suggests that a combination of technical
features, parent oversight, and user education is necessary to manage the risks of virtual
worlds for youth. The challenge in our current childhood landscape is that any risk is
perceived as unacceptable. We appear to live in a risk-averse culture that works not just to
reduce unnecessary risk, but also to eliminate the slightest possibility of harm to children
(Byron, 2010).
The ability to identify and manage harmful or threatening situations,
however, is a key developmental capacity, and allows youth to manage uncertainty as they
mature (Christensen & Mikkelsen, 2008). Efforts to eliminate exposure to risk may limit
opportunities for young people to develop essential cognitive and metacognitive strategies
(Livingstone, 2009). Donovan and Katz (2009) argue that children are informed social actors
and that attempts by adults to monitor their online behavior and filter their websites has a
chilling effect on children’s and youth’s privacy and free speech.
Speaking more broadly, there are important societal motivations for better
understanding the competing values on digital playgrounds. First, as these sites grow in
popularity and number, designers, policy makers, and parents need guidance in creating,
regulating, and facilitating children’s online environments.
The adults mediating these
worlds did not grow up in immersive spaces; children are venturing into largely uncharted
territory. Second, these worlds provide us an opportunity to think critically about societal
expectations of online environments. Is Club Penguin (owned by Disney Interactive) the
equivalent of a sandbox at a public park, where parents and other caregivers are expected to
mediate children’s interactions to teach socially appropriate and “safe” behaviors? In this
framing, some level of risk is assumed by those who take their children to the sandbox.
Alternatively are these sites like a ride at Disneyland, where movements and interactions are
tightly constrained and monitored. In this framing, the parents, who watch as their child is
buckled into the ride, assume almost no risk and the Disney Corporation is expected to
prevent any harm from happening to the children. These issues deserve explicit attention and
deliberation. The answers that emerge will affect the future of digital play.
Value Sensitive Design
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 8
Developed by Batya Friedman’s research team at the University of Washington,
Value Sensitive Design (VSD) provides a principled approach to the analysis of interactive
system design (Friedman, 2004; Friedman & Kahn, 2003; Friedman et al., 2006). Value
sensitive design (VSD) represents a methodological practice based upon an interactional
theory which together provide a framework for scaffolding the critical examination of human
values during the design, use and evaluation of such systems. The VSD approach has been
successfully used in diverse projects including computer simulations in urban planning
(Borning, Friedman, Davis, & Lin, 2005), the design of code sharing software (Miller,
Friedman, Jancke, & Gill, 2007), the creation of end-user license agreements (Friedman,
Smith, Kahn, Consalvo, & Selawski, 2006), and the analysis of technology practices in
intentional communities (Nathan, 2009).
Friedman and her colleagues contend that through interactions with information
systems, values can be reinforced and/or destabilized. The values that VSD research focuses
upon are those that are asserted to be of moral weight. However throughout the broad range
of VSD investigations, other values such as democratic fairness and usability have been
investigated (Friedman, 2004). Explications of VSD state that they define a value as “what a
person or group of people consider important in life” (Friedman et al., 2006, p. 2). Examples
of human values that may be integral to understanding the relationship between youth and
interactive systems like a virtual world include self-actualization, privacy, autonomy,
community, safety, and anonymity.
Values are uncovered and conceptualized through three types of rigorous, iterative
and integrative investigations that are labeled conceptual, empirical, and technical. There is
no strict ordering of these investigations and they can be undergone simultaneously. In the
ideal manifestation of a VSD project, the investigations happen in such a way that they are
able to inform each other, making each investigation more robust. However, it can be
unmanageable, especially within the time and resource constraints of most research projects,
to conduct all three investigations concurrently. A brief description of each type of
investigation is provided below.
•
Conceptual investigations typically begin by identifying the stakeholders who will be
affected by the design under study. This would include both the direct stakeholders,
those who will actually use the device and indirect stakeholders, those who may not
physically touch the technology, but whose lives will be influenced through a direct
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 9
stakeholder’s use of the technology. For example, a conceptual investigation of a
satellite monitoring system designed to assist law enforcement personnel of a small
community would identify the community’s police officers as direct stakeholders and
individuals living in the community, but without direct access to the system, as
indirect stakeholders. Identifying and defining the values implicated by a technology
is the second key component of a conceptual investigation. The example of the
satellite monitoring system may implicate values such as privacy and personal safety.
In a conceptual investigation, the work of philosophers and other scholars is drawn
upon to develop robust understandings of the values under scrutiny.
•
Technical investigations are primarily concerned with the features of the technology
under investigation and may include actually designing a technology or investigating
how specific features implicate certain values. A technical investigation focuses on
the technology itself. However, we recognize that what a technical feature “does” is
socially constructed and negotiated between site users and site developers. Thus, the
technical investigation reported on here takes an explicit look at the practices that
develop to help direct stakeholders understand and manage technical features.
•
Empirical investigations serve to expand the conceptual investigations by using both
language and observable actions (through surveys, questionnaires, interviews,
participant observations, experiments) to deepen the investigators’ understanding of
both the context and the values implicated through the interactions with a design. An
empirical investigation focuses on the actions of human actors.
Methodology and Findings
To deepen our understanding of children’s virtual worlds we conducted VSD-
informed conceptual and technical investigations of two such sites: Club Penguin
(http://www.clubpenguin.com) and Woogi World (http://www.woogiworld.com). Both
spaces are designed expressly for youth, but each approaches the values of safety and
surveillance differently. These two sites were selected from a range of virtual worlds
examined (others include EcoBuddies, BarbieGirls, Webkinz, and HandiPoints, along with
several worlds aimed at older children, such as Gaia, Habbo, Millberry), and identified by
their characteristics as contrasting cases. Material for both investigations was drawn from
technical and documentary features of the sites, as well as investigators’ interactions with the
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 10
sites as users (2007-2010). Investigators also identified and interacted with supplementary
online materials related to these virtual worlds including user-generated content (e.g. blogs
and websites, YouTube channels), review sites (e.g. Commonsensemedia.org), and website
analytics. To be clear, the analyses presented below are illustrative not exhaustive. There are
myriad technical features and practices that could be presented in depth, but this analysis
emphasizes those features that support or constrain stakeholders’ perceptions of safety and
surveillance.
The findings within this section are organized as follows: first, we provide highlights
related to stakeholders, values and interaction that arose from the conceptual investigations of
both sites. We follow-up the highlights from the conceptual work with findings of note from
the technical investigation. An organizational table helps to draw apart technical features
from the behavioral cues that the sites put in place to frame how users interpret and interact
with the technical features. To assist in synthesizing the findings from the two investigations,
the section concludes with two case studies that demonstrate how surprisingly similar
technical features are interpreted through the different behavioral expectations of the sites to
create two disparate interpretations of a “safe” virtual playground.
Conceptual Investigation
Due to space constraints we focus on specific insights afforded by four elements of
our conceptual investigation into children’s virtual worlds, namely: 1) Multiple stakeholders;
2) implicated values; 3) value tensions; and 4) systemic interactions.
Multiple Stakeholder Roles
While virtual worlds such as Club Penguin and Woogi World are designed expressly
for younger users, there are often multiple stakeholder roles, direct and indirect, which are
affected by use of these technologies. In the VSD tradition, direct stakeholders are those who
interact with the technology, such as the children who login to the world of Club Penguin.
The parents of these children fall into the role of indirect stakeholders if they never login to
the system themselves. Indirect stakeholders do not interact with a technology, but they are
still influenced by others’ use of the system. Even though a parent does not login to Club
Penguin, he may be affected by the time his daughter spends on the computer caring for her
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 11
penguin and socializing with friends.
The VSD methodology also recognizes that
stakeholders may take on more than one role with regard to a given technology. Parents may
begin as direct stakeholders, initially logging in to a site to “check it out”. However, after that
initial foray, parents may passively slide into the role of indirect stakeholder if they never log
in to the site again. VSD work also reminds us to be aware of nefarious roles that users may
take on (Nathan et al., 2008). Kids may be users and beneficiaries of a virtual world; at the
same time acting maliciously or subversively to undermine the experience for other users
through hacks or cheats. The boundaries between these roles (user vs. hacker, player vs.
cheat) may be fluid and dependent on the norms of behavior in a technological space, or the
expectations of other direct and indirect stakeholders.
Implicated Values: Safety, Surveillance and Privacy
Safety, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), is a term that defines “the
condition of being safe,” and safe, “protected from or not exposed to danger or risk” (OED,
pp. 1264, 1265). Safety awareness initiatives and security policies that aim to provide some
type of monitoring for children’s online behavior echo concerns regarding risk in childhood
in general (Staksrud & Livingstone, 2009). Monitoring children with technology throughout
their day has become commonplace in the U.S. and other parts of the developed world.
Children are watched in the crib via “baby monitors” and teddy bear cameras, in the hallways
of schools and shopping malls through closed-circuit television systems, and online with the
assistance of software applications such as Net Nanny and CyberPatrol. Such monitoring is
rooted in adult concerns for the safety of children, whose sense of danger and appropriate
behavior is still developing.
Beyond managing the risks of growing up, the everyday behaviors of adults and
children are coming under increased surveillance under the auspices of personal safety,
corporate risk management, and national security. Such moves increasingly equate “safety”
with reduced personal privacy and increased surveillance, either by corporations, the state, or
organizations acting on the state’s behalf. We can define surveillance as the “collection and
processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purpose of influencing or
managing those whose data have been garnered” (Lyon, 2001, p. 2). In the United States, the
surveillance of activity through data collection comes with the limited right of the user or
citizen to know what data is gathered, and how it is used to safeguard the individual
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 12
(Andrejevic, 2007). In virtual worlds and other social software, end-user license agreements
(EULAs) or Terms of Service (ToS) are written broadly to permit the hosting company to
gather and save chat transcripts and other user information indefinitely to improve “the
Service” (e.g. Linden Research, 2010), ostensibly for the benefit of the user.
Lyon (2001) writes that there are two faces to surveillance: care and control. When
we use technology to watch over children, we may have the primary instinct to reduce their
privacy in order to keep them from physical or psychological harm. We may also wish to
observe children’s activities to ensure that they do not get into mischief. This latter purpose,
though not always in conflict with the former, applies a different set of criteria to the
situation. A different set of values is at play when we prioritize behavioral outcomes through
surveillance. The developers of virtual worlds for children appear to have several different
goals in mind when designing features to keep children “safe”:
providing fun and
entertainment for children, pleasing adult gatekeepers, avoiding litigious situations that may
emerge through use, and gaining (and maintaining) profitability. While these goals are not
necessarily at odds with each other, an emphasis on one may constrain the ability of the
virtual world to fulfill another.
This begs the question of whether monitoring and
surveillance activities in virtual worlds for children privilege control over care.
Value Tensions
Previous VSD investigations call attention to the design challenges that emerge when
values are in tension with each other (e.g., Miller et al., 2007). Sensitivity to value tensions
helps us identify when different stakeholder roles bring different views and values to their
interactions with a given system. A system may actively support a value of a key indirect
stakeholder (e.g., parents and safety) while constraining a value of a direct stakeholder
(children and self expression). We can see how this plays out in the different interpretations
children and their parents bring to virtual worlds. The features of children’s virtual worlds,
like chat systems with limited dictionaries or active monitoring, can impact different
stakeholders in different ways. Limited chat supports the values of one key stakeholder (e.g.
parents who value safe, appropriate conversations among youth) for the purpose of
constraining the values of another stakeholder (e.g. pedophiles who seek freedom of
expression to groom young children) while limiting the activities of another stakeholder
(children who wish for freedom of expression to try on different identities). These tensions
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 13
often represent design trade-offs, where supporting a range of values may be contradictory or
impossible. By uncovering these tensions, designers can envision the long-term effect of
design decisions, and recognize when supporting one set of values over another (e.g.
supporting parents’ concern for safety and appropriate communication over children’s
communicative rights) may result in unintended use scenarios, user work-arounds and hacks,
or undesirable activity in other aspects of the system (Nathan et al., 2008).
Systemic Interactions
Recent VSD work highlights the systemic and emergent effects of interactions with
interactive information systems (Friedman & Nathan, 2010). Similar to offline geographically
placed environmental ecologies, online virtual world ecologies are made up of countless
features that interact and influence each other over time. A feature of a virtual space does not
exist in isolation; it influences other system features, users, and activities outside the system.
Participation in virtual spaces is consequential: the user’s presence is part of the experience,
and consequential to the way other users experience the space (Pearce, 2009). As a result,
virtual worlds for children, through wide-scale participatory structures, have systemic effects
and emergent qualities that support or contradict the intentions of the system designers. The
communicative limits of children’s virtual worlds, for example, have effects within the virtual
world and outside of it: children incorporate alternate chat vocabularies to circumvent word
lists, construct blogs and videos to convey hacks and cheats, and actively disseminate
information about the world that affects the way other users experience and perceive it.
Technical Investigation
The conceptual investigation highlighted the issues that emerge in children’s virtual
worlds surrounding safety and surveillance. The technical investigation illustrates these
tensions and effects by examining two example virtual worlds in-depth. These two spaces
were chosen to provide two contrasting cases of safety and surveillance. The two worlds
have instantiated different choices in terms of technical features and behavioral cues that in
turn shape and illuminate the ethos of the sites themselves. Table 1 highlights just a few
differences and similarities between these two virtual worlds in terms of these choices. For
each world we identify the premise that guides user interactions, how the site defines safety
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 14
in its information materials, technical and supporting features.
CLUB PENGUIN
WOOGI WORLD
“Waddle around and meet new
“Teaching kids Internet safety, life
friends”
values, and fun!”
Anthropomorphic penguins populate
The Woogis are an alien race
an animated snow-covered
corrupted by excessive online time.
community of shops, games, and
The children of Earth help the
activity spaces. Children register with
Woogis by adopting them and
the site to engage in activities using
teaching them appropriate activities
the penguins as avatars. Children are
and limits. Children control a Woogi
encouraged to “waddle around” and
character, perform tasks, play games,
play independently or with others.
and earn virtual currency.
Definition of
Club Penguin explicitly and
Woogi World includes a definition of
Safety
prominently addresses safety concerns
safety in its parents’ section: “A
with a description on the parent page
combination of appropriate mindset
of chat limitations. “Ultimate Safe
and behavior validated by a
Chat limits what users can say to a
community of like-minded people.”
Slogan
Premise
predefined menu of greetings,
questions and statements, as well as
emotes, actions and greeting cards.”
Technical Feature:
Email address required to activate
Email address required to activate
Account creation
account; No personal information
account; No personal information
required to create user ID aside from
required to create user ID aside from
email address; Accounts require
email address.
regular use to remain active.
Technical Feature:
Multi-level chat including “ultimate
Users must complete a training
Chat
safe chat” option; can chat with or
program on appropriate and
“friend” anyone in the “room”; Chat
inappropriate chat behavior; Honors
does not support distribution of files
users have special chat privileges;
or hyperlinks; Sharing personal
Multi-level chat including “safe”
information (age, phone number,
chat; can chat with or “friend” anyone
address) is not permitted.
in the “room”; Chat does not support
distribution of files or hyperlinks;
Sharing personal information (age,
phone number, address) is not
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 15
permitted .
Technical Feature:
User profiles contain no personal information aside from login name.
User Profile
Technical Feature:
All content is generated in-world or by site designers.
User-generated
content
Technical Feature:
Automated monitoring of chat1;
Automated monitoring of chat; Active
Activity Monitoring
Active adult & peer monitoring of
adult & peer monitoring of behavior;
behavior; Ability to report other users
Ability to report other users for
for inappropriate behavior.
inappropriate behavior.
Other Supporting
Parent Section; Parent reporting
Parent section; Big Wig blog;
Features
options (for time on site, but not
Premise supports limited online time;
activities); Special socialization
Special socialization features limited
features limited to paying members
to paying members
Table 1. Site comparison.
Through our technical analysis, we identified a series of site features that potentially
affect the safety and privacy of users, either explicitly or implicitly. Explicit technical
features include the account creation and user profile, chat features, user content generation,
and activity monitoring. Implicit features include the site slogan and premise, as well as how
the site defines safety, explicitly or implicitly. The slogan and premise of each world,
although not obvious technical features of the site, set the tone of the site, and perhaps more
importantly, frame the technical features for child and adult stakeholders. This provides an
ethos that shapes stakeholders’ emergent practice. For example, the Woogi World slogan,
“Teaching kids life values, Internet safety, and fun,” makes explicit that educating users in
safe Internet practices is a goal of system. It arguably addresses parents or adult guardians
rather than youth in that it speaks of “kids” in the third person.
Many of the site features are held in common, suggesting that different sites use a
common template of technical features for user safety and privacy (“safety by design”). Both
sites analyzed here require users to provide a valid email address, but do not validate the age
of the user. Instead, nearly all personal information, including age and location, are kept
from other users. In the absence of being able to confirm that all users are children, these
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Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 16
sites keep all users at the same high level of anonymity.
Differences largely reside in the ethos of the virtual world, the textual and pictorial
framing the sites use to balance the technical features with certain social interactions and
practice. Both regard inappropriate text chat as a key danger to users; this is consistent with
other virtual worlds and social networks designed for younger users. Most of the textual
information about the spaces is directed at adults in the roles of parents, teachers, or
caregivers as key stakeholders in the success of these playgrounds. Club Penguin relies
heavily on its technical affordances to police chat, relying less on human monitoring, either
through adults or peers, to eliminate inappropriate sharing of personal information (names,
addresses, phone numbers) or sexually explicit and crude/mean/harassing language. This
may be due to the enormous traffic through this space, which would be difficult to monitor
effectively through human moderation. Woogi World, on the other hand, employs significant
user education and social pressure to encourage users to conform to conduct expectations, in
addition to many of the same technical features, as a first line of defense against inappropriate
content. Other virtual worlds employ different blends of these two mechanisms to achieve a
“safe” environment. All the virtual worlds these authors are aware of in this genre include
some kind of surveillance mechanism that is beyond the oversight children would experience
on a physical playground, and their privacy in these spaces is significantly curtailed at the
expense of regulating speech and behavior.
“Safety” in children’s virtual worlds never means freedom from commercial
inducements and hard-sell advertising, however. Subscription levels – paying members vs.
registered users – strongly affect how users interact in these spaces. The degree of freedom
permitted to paying members of these and other virtual playgrounds, including chat
privileges, social organizations, and displays of status and belonging, is at a significantly
higher level. Membership has its privileges, and virtual worlds are designed to showcase this
disparity: the haves and have-nots are identifiable at a glance by the appearance of their
avatars. In some ways, this makes the non-paying members not only inferior but also
suspect, and adds to the ethos of lateral (peer-to-peer) surveillance that is layered on top of
the constant adult monitoring.
Emergent Interactions: Case Example of Children’s Virtual Worlds
We present the following case examples to illustrate how these two virtual worlds
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 17
frame parent and child expectations of safe behavior in online virtual environments. The two
cases explore the interactions that emerge as users interact with the technical features and the
narratives that surround these features.
Case 1: Club Penguin
Club Penguin is a virtual playground employing the metaphor of the Antarctic where
children are encouraged to “waddle around and make new friends.” Users register with the
site to engage in activities as anthropomorphic penguins in an animated snow-covered
community of shops, games, and activity spaces. Users can perform tasks in the community
(making pizzas at the pizzeria, unloading coffee beans at the café, and of course, rounding up
puffles) in order to earn virtual currency (“coins”). They use this currency to purchase
clothing, pets, and accessories for their penguin avatars and to decorate their “igloo” or
private online space. A large number of features, including the ability to buy most clothing
items, are reserved for subscription users who pay $5.95 per month (as of August 30, 2010).
Users can create friend lists and chat with other penguins via a simple dashboard interface.
Adult moderators monitor chat, and can penalize through temporary or permanent
banishment users who violate the chat guidelines, namely “mean” or age-inappropriate talk,
such as sex or drug references.
Although an explicit definition of safety is not provided, Club Penguin prominently
addresses safety concerns with a description on the parent page of chat limitations. “Ultimate
Safe Chat limits what users can say to a predefined menu of greetings, questions and
statements, as well as emotes, actions and greeting cards. When it comes to chatting, these
users can only see other Ultimate Safe Chat messages” (Club Penguin, 2009). Thus, within
Club Penguin’s Ultimate Safe Chat, the value of safety is threatened by conversations in
which either children or adults reveal inappropriate information. Club Penguin is an all-ages
site, even if it is designed for children.
There is no age verification, and parents are
encouraged to interact with their children on the site. This suggests the space is open to the
possibility of contact between and among users of any age, albeit anonymously and in the
form of a penguin avatar. Unable to truly control who is in the space, safety is “realized”
through technical features that restrict conversation among users.
This is not to suggest that inappropriate behavior cannot happen in these spaces.
Users are constantly testing the bounds of what can and cannot be said and done, despite (or
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 18
perhaps because of) the technical features. The restriction on sharing phone numbers and
addresses is easily circumvented with alternate words considered “safe” by the chat filter
(e.g. won too tree for fakes tweet = 1234 Fake Street). Witness the plethora of YouTube
videos
documenting
cussing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHO6BTUbmYw).
hacks
(e.g.
“fuckity”
Users also engage in explicit
pseudo-sexual play (“pseudo” in that there is only so much one can do with an asexual
cartoon penguin) using code phrases developed outside the restrictions of the space, such as
the proposition “wanna”. Contributors on CommonSenseMedia.org, a site that provides usergenerated reviews of popular children’s movies, games, and television shows, describe the
various work-arounds they have used or witnessed, despite generally positive ratings.
To buttress the technical limitations of the safety features, users are recruited to aid in
making Club Penguin safe through active peer monitoring. Young children often engage in
gender policing (“boys don’t wear pink”), and this tendency is leveraged to police
conversation in virtual spaces as well. After 30 days in Club Penguin, users may apply for
Secret Agent status, which permits a user to tattle on offensive peers. Innocuous schoolyard
taunts (“Boys rule, girls drool!”) may be treated with a barrage of text rebukes and entreaties
to the monitor to censure the offending penguin. By assigning the coveted title of Secret
Agent to tattlers, paired with the anonymous nature of monitoring and peer surveillance in
this space, Club Penguin has established a system through which any conversation that
offends or is interpreted as “mean” by another user may be reported and penalized.
Case 2: Woogi World
According to the storyline behind Woogi World, the Woogis are an advanced alien
race corrupted by excessive online time without careful monitoring. The children of Earth can
help the Woogis by adopting them, and teaching them appropriate online activities and
behavioral limits. In Woogi World, children adopt a Woogi character (control its
movements), perform tasks, play games, and earn virtual currency (“Woogi Watts”), which
they can use to decorate their “wigwams” or accessorize their adopted Woogi avatars. Virtual
activity spaces are learning oriented, and include a science lab, savings bank, and a library.
Children are also provided incentives for off-line activities (e.g., helping with chores, playing
board games with family members). A simple, adult monitored chat interface is provided, and
several games are designed as social, multiplayer experiences. Woogi World describes its
goals on the site’s front page: “teaching kids Internet safety, life values, and fun.”
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 19
Woogi World includes a definition of safety in its parents section: “A combination of
appropriate mindset and behavior validated by a community of like-minded people” (Clare,
2008). Woogi World, however, does not describe specific technical features that promote
safety. Instead it describes to parents how the site’s rules, standards, and regulations are
embodied by the children who are now serving as their own moderators, in addition to the
site’s adult moderators. In order to enable chat features, Woogis (users) have to go through a
short, intense training program that asks them to correctly distinguish between appropriate
and inappropriate chat phrases. In Woogi World, as in Club Penguin, the value of safety is
threatened by conversations in which inappropriate information is shared. Woogi World is
also an open, all-ages space. However, Woogi World promotes habits of mind in games and
activities. For example, in the “Service Station”, which looks like a gasoline pump, users
document the good deeds they have done for others in order to advance their status in the
system. Thus, in addition to technical features, Woogi World addresses parents’ concerns for
safety through developing a strong ethos of “appropriate” interactions.
Figure 1. The Big Wig.
While Club Penguin includes several non-player characters that appear from time to
time for the purpose of introducing new activities (Rockhopper the Pirate, Aunt Arctic, the
dojo Sensei), the key non-player in Woogi World, the Big Wig, acts as a boss character or
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 20
leader, actively promoting the site’s value system, cautioning users, and providing
information that helps mediate play. The Big Wig (see Figure 1) looks remarkably like a
cartoonish Big Brother from George Orwell’s 1984, appearing as a giant head with a
prominent mustache. He extorts users to sign-up for Woogi Honors, the fee-based aspect of
the virtual world that bestows users with additional rights and privileges – “get COOL things
that regular Woogis don’t” – such as more advanced vocabulary in chat, pet ownership,
clothing options, and the ability to create and join social groups. In addition, by joining
Woogi Honors, users may join clubs and groups that provide another level of socialization
within the space. One such club, the WW Police, has as its motto: “we are going to find all
bad woogis in woogi world [sic]”.
The Big Wig regularly reminds users that their
subscriptions will make Woogi World even better.
Discussion: Implications for Design
How do we keep young Internet users safe? Whose responsibility is it to keep these
children safe? As many scholars and policy makers suggest, it requires a mix of user
education, improved technology, and parental oversight. One of the challenges is finding the
right mix of these elements, and how to balance social and technical features while
envisioning their systemic effects.
Rather than responding to moral panics or isolated
breakdowns, designers and policy makers need to think holistically about how virtual worlds
– virtual communities of impressionable users in this case – and design decisions influence
both specific behaviors as well as perceptions of how online interactions work. If a virtual
world like Club Penguin is a child’s first foray into online social networking and
communication, these perceptions may have lasting impact.
A key issue identified through this analysis exists between children as direct
stakeholders, who value fun, sociality and communication, and the adult stakeholders who
provide access to these spaces, who value safety.
The designers of Woogi World,
recognizing parents as a key gatekeeper, have emphasized the parents’ values over that of the
children, and instantiated this value in features and social practices that emphasize limited
communication and a culture of tattling. Club Penguin has similar technical features, but is
geared more for children, but the social pressures focus on children as consumers.
Although they take a different orientation to these two stakeholder groups, both
worlds use surveillance as both a protective as well as a disciplinary tool . Teaching children
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 21
moral and ethical behavior is important whether they are citizens of virtual or physical
worlds. Virtual worlds for children provide diverse means of modeling appropriate behavior,
but some of the systemic effects of an emphasis on safety can be troubling. Encouraging an
anonymous, politically correct tattle-tale culture and permitting hyper-vigilance to evolve
into vigilantism to enforce social norms sends an unfortunate message to young users.
Furthermore, wrapping model behavior in an aggressive commercialism suggests to users that
purchasing citizenship is an effective and rewarding form of participation.
From this analysis, we propose three implications for the design of virtual worlds for
children. First, we suggest that designers need to be cognizant of the way their decisions
around the social framing of technical features create value tensions in a virtual space (e.g.,
safety vs. surveillance). Second, designers should consider adjusting the blend of technical
and social features to place more responsibility for safety on direct stakeholders, namely
children and their adult caregivers and less on the site itself. Third, site designers should
increase the transparency of technical features and surveillance practices to facilitate user
education. These implications are elaborated upon below.
Features of children’s worlds are affected by their framing, specifically by the
language and practices that are encouraged by the interaction design. In Woogi World, for
example, there might not be a self-organized “WWPolice” of users seeking to identify “all
the bad Woogis” if there was not implicit support for this activity. This support comes in the
form of 1) framing the Internet as a potentially harmful place that requires user vigilance; 2)
rewarding peer monitoring by making this part of the user’s advancement structure; 3) setting
apart the users who purchase memberships, creating a stratified user community (those who
“make Woogi World even better” in contrast to non-paying users). While the technical
feature—the ability to report violations of the rules to a site monitor—is common in
children’s virtual worlds, the affect it has on user behavior may be different when it is not
supported by these behavioral incentives.
In this light, separating technical from social features in discussions of children’s
technology may be impossible. The argument of “safety by design” is to some extent one
which employs a technological determinist framing. Safety cannot be ensured through a set
of predetermined features. Instead, safety is realized through a combination of technical and
behavioral interactions. Virtual worlds in their current instantiation emphasize one vision of
a safe world for children, namely where they are free from “inappropriate” language.
Designers should be cognizant of the way this design decision (highly constrained chat
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 22
systems) creates value tensions: while it may appeal to parent stakeholders, it comes largely
at the expense of younger users’ communicative rights. It also has systemic effects: kids
develop chat hacks and work-arounds, which are addressed through increased monitoring and
the imposition of user penalties.
Reports from researchers (Livingstone, 2009) and government agencies (Byron, 2010;
Federal Trade Commission, 2010) agree that a combination of technology, user education,
and parental oversight is necessary to fulfill societal expectations of safe online play. Our
analysis, however, reveals that there are different blends of these factors in children’s virtual
worlds. In many virtual worlds, the technology shoulders most the safety burden, passing
some responsibility to child users through peer monitoring, and almost none to the adult/
parent stakeholder.
Would most parents feel comfortable dropping off a preteen at an
amusement park with only the park staff for oversight? The designers of children’s online
worlds should experiment with the blend of technical features and stakeholder responsibility,
perhaps in virtual “sandboxes”, where the level and ownership of safety features can be
shifted and the effects analyzed.
Virtual worlds for children are easy to join and use, with a shallow learning curve
designed to match the developmental capacity of young people. They are also opaque in the
way they function, providing little guidance for users in terms of how the technical features
protect their interests and keep them “safe”. For example, while all the systems we observed
have limited (and evolving) chat dictionaries, users are not able to see what words are
permitted or why certain, seemingly innocuous terms, are restricted. As a result of this lack
of structure, the boundaries of appropriate behavior are constantly (re)discovered and
contested by users. Designers should consider a balance of child agency with opportunities
for teachable moments and instruction in what it means to be a good “cyber-citizen”.
Limitations and Future Research
The work presented here relies upon observational data from the investigators using
the sites themselves and documenting features of the sites that they encountered during those
interactions. Thus, the primary limitation of the work is that key voices are missing. There is
much to be learned from site designers, children who use the sites, and their parents,
educators, and other caregivers of these children. The findings from the conceptual and
technical investigations presented in this work, raise pointed questions concerning the
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 23
systemic nature of virtual world interactions. Although the current work provides
recommendations, these recommendations need to be bolstered by further empirical,
longitudinal research. Two key questions that should be addressed through this longitudinal
work with parents, caregivers, children and designers include:
•
What are the implications for children’s development of self, refashionable identity
within these environments?
•
Can we design sites that encourage and support active parental and caregiver
mediation?
Conclusion
Through this values-oriented examination of virtual worlds for children we have taken
the first steps toward addressing the design tensions present in “safe” virtual spaces. While
both of these worlds are “opt-in” environments – children choose to engage with these spaces
– the approaches to safety and communication severely limit the creative potential within
these spaces. If the hopes regarding children’s virtual spaces are to be fulfilled, the creative
work will more likely be done outside these playgrounds (in affinity spaces --blogs, wikis -and in physical spaces). Also of concern is the message these spaces may send to children
about communication and interaction online: that their actions and messages are under
constant surveillance by other users and anonymous, hidden site moderators. Is this an
appropriate balance between parental anxiety over safety and children’s privacy?
It is
unclear how children perceive these safety features in use, and to what extent these features
may have a “chilling effect” on interaction and communication. Additional work is planned
to fill this gap in our understanding.
There is tremendous opportunity for future research in virtual worlds from a design
perspective. Little is known about the lifecycle of virtual world adoption among young
people, in part because these spaces are relatively new and researchers are just beginning to
grasp the importance of understanding how children and virtual worlds interact. Marketers
who track virtual worlds feel that these spaces are a “training ground” for next generation 3D
web interfaces. As such, the social and philosophical implications should be addressed so
that the systemic interactions are understood. We need to move beyond descriptions of these
spaces to developing an understanding of the long-term implications of design decisions that
affect children’s understanding of human values, including privacy, safety, and
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 24
communication rights. Virtual play may have real consequences.
Journal of Virtual Worlds Research – Who’s Watching Your Kids? 25
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